Morphological Length and Prosodically Defective Morphemes

This book investigates the phenomenon of morphological length manipulation: changes in segmental length that cannot be explained by phonological means alone but crucially rely on morphological information. Eva Zimmermann provides a unified theoretical account of these phenomena by taking into account all possible prosodically defective morpheme representations and their potential effects on the resulting surface structure. Data are drawn from a wide range of the world's languages, including Aymara, Yine, Upriver Halkomelem, Wolof, Hungarian, Tohono O'odham, and Southern Sierra Miwok, providing a through representative database of morphological length manipulation patterns in the languages of the world. The author demonstrates that alternative accounts suffer from significant problems of both under- and over-generation when tested against the full range of attested phenomena. The volume will be of interest to all researchers and graduate students working in theoretical phonology and morphology.

Eva Zimmermann is a Research Associate at Leipzig University as part of a German Research Foundation funded project on 'Featural Affixes: The Morphology of Phonological Features'. Her research principally examines non-concatenative morphology and its analysis in phonological theory, particularly in Native American languages, as well as verbal agreement morphology in Kiranti and Broader Algic. Her work has appeared in Lingua, Phonology, and edited volumes from OUP and Wiley-Blackwell.